Harvard students and faculty celebrate defiance of Trump’s demands

While the Trump administration reacted within hours by freezing over $2 billion in grants and contracts to Harvard, the university’s stance was widely applauded within the academic world after weeks of unprecedented government actions against higher education institutions.  

“They clearly did not just the right thing, but the necessary thing, and my guess is that a lot of other institutions will follow suit,” said Jon Fansmith, senior vice president of government relations at the American Council on Education, a higher education membership association. 

Harvard — founded a century before the United States — is by far the wealthiest university in the country and the most influential in the world. It boasts more alumni who’ve become U.S. presidents, Supreme Court justices, members of Congress, living billionaires and Nobel Prize winners than any other school. 

Maya Jasanoff, a history professor at Harvard, said the scope of the demands left the university with no choice but to reject them.  

“It had the potential to interfere with every single aspect of everything that we do on campus: what I sign, what I say, what I write about, what I think about practically, who is in my classroom, who are my colleagues, everything,” Jasanoff said. 

The Trump administration has already cut or frozen funding to several Ivy League institutions and opened dozens of investigations into other colleges about how they’ve dealt with antisemitism and pro-Palestinian protests over the past two years. 

Fellow academics have condemned higher education leaders for not speaking out more forcefully against the Trump administration’s pressure on universities.  

Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University and an outspoken critic of the Trump administration’s directives to colleges, applauded Harvard’s statement. 

“Federal funding for universities must not depend on a loyalty oath,” Roth said in a statement.